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The Letters from Ireland

After publishing a manifesto prophecy about the catastrophic immediate-future entitled The New Revelations of Being, Antonin Artaud abruptly left Paris and travelled to Ireland, remaining there for six weeks and existing without money. On his return, he spent nine years in lunatic asylums, including the entire span of the Second World War. During that journey to Ireland—on which he accumulated signs of his forthcoming apocalypse, and planned his own role in it as ‘THE REVEALED ONE’—he wrote letters to friends in Paris.

Antonin Artaud’s 1937 apocalyptic journey to Ireland and his writings from that journey form an extraordinary moment of accumulating disintegration and tenacious creativity in his work.

With an afterword and notes by the book’s translator/editor Stephen Barber.

is the author of twenty-five books, including seven novels, most recently Berlin Bodies (Reaktion) and Guyotat: Revolutions and Aberrations (Vauxhall&Co). He has received several awards for his books, which have been translated into many languages, such as Japanese and Chinese. The Independent newspaper (London) once called him “the most dangerous man in Europe.”